1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to management of users and more specifically to simplifying determination of the groups to which users belong when using dynamic groups.
2. Related Art
A group refers to a set of users, treated as a single entity in the management of various tasks. For example, groups are often used to simplify specification of access controls of shared resources, to facilitate easier addressing when sending communications (e.g., email) to the users/members of a group, to facilitate co-operative work (e.g., software coding, work-flows), etc. Thus, each user of a group is said to be a member of that group. A user may be a member of (can belong to) multiple groups.
A dynamic group is a type of group in which the members are identified based on corresponding rule/criteria indicating the conditions to be satisfied by the user attributes (such as name, location, job title, etc.). The users whose values of the attributes satisfy the rule are determined to belong to the corresponding dynamic group. In sharp contrast, in static groups, the list of users/members belonging to each group is maintained manually by an administrator.
It is often required that the groups to which users belong be determined (a common operation along with determining the user that belong to a group). Such a determination may be performed efficiently with static groups by checking whether the user is contained in the member lists maintained by the administrator.
On the other hand, for dynamic groups, the determination of the groups to which a user belongs may necessitate that member lists corresponding to each of the dynamic groups be determined dynamically and then be checked as done with respect to static groups. Alternatively, the values of the user attributes may be checked against the rules corresponding to each of the dynamic groups. It may be appreciated that such determination may require considerable amount of time and/or resources, in particular, when the number of dynamic groups is large.
Accordingly, it may be desirable that the determination of the groups to which user belong be simplified (or made more efficient) even when using dynamic groups.
In the drawings, like reference numbers generally indicate identical, functionally similar, and/or structurally similar elements. The drawing in which an element first appears is indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the corresponding reference number.